How it feels to get dunked on

Bad and sad - but not in the way you'd think

First; Phew, that email about our weekly dinners really hit! Thanks and hi to the hundreds of strangers now getting this email.

As I wrote in my initial relaunch of this Substack, I’m not quite sure what this will be yet. (I will circle back on how our dinners are going though, I promise — last weekend, my husband made excellent pork tenderloin that we enjoyed with a longtime friend and a daycare family we rarely see outside the playground!)

This week, I want to talk about that time — well, the most recent time — I got dunked on on the internet.

Taking a step back: Last week I read Chris Hayes’ excellent new book, The Sirens’ Call, a deeply researched and occasionally personal look at attention — how it functions on the personal and societal level, what it does to our brains to be constantly bombarded by things demanding our focus, and why it’s arguably our economy’s most valuable resource.

In chapter four, on “social attention,” starting around page 98, he explains something that hit so deeply I took pictures of my Kindle:

The more people pay attention to you, the more you will encounter people who don’t care for you, who in fact hate your guts. Positive attention from strangers is quickly metabolized and soon becomes routine. The little bursts of endorphins weaken until someone stopping you on the street to tell you how much they admire what you do hardly registers at all.

But the experience of negative attention stings at a level of emotional depth that is downright shocking. There’s a cosmic joke here being played on you that it takes a little while to catch on to. Nearly all the social attention we receive in life is from people we know: family, friends, kin, coworkers. This conditions us to care what other people say or think about us, because caring what they say or think is what makes up the reciprocal glue of the relationship.

The devilish trick of social attention from strangers is that it comes with no relationship and no reciprocity attached. But you don’t realize that! Or if you do at an intellectual level, you can’t quite internalize it at the deepest level of your psyche. Your training on this is just too strong: you’ve spent your whole life almost entirely interacting with people reciprocally. So you read a negative comment online and immediately, at an almost physical level, you react as if someone you love had uttered the words. Something inside you rips even though that something is a fiction — a bond to a person you do not know and will never know. …

Even though this negative attention leaves you feeling raw and bruised, you end up compulsively seeking out more and more of it. … Any positive words would barely register, but insults and criticisms rippled through my consciousness, sometimes ruining whole days.”

I am not a cable news host nor do I have any amount of fame beyond the tiniest social media following related to my work. But I do have the great privilege of running Run for Something — I’m mostly uninterested in writing about politics in this space but you can get our weekly updates here — and part of my role as cofounder and president is that I do a lot of public spokesperson-ing.

Said another way, I (strategically) post about politics a lot for a living. I mostly like that part of my job! I am lucky and grateful that I primarily get to talk about good stuff, even when shit sucks. Our work is positive, forward-looking, and about the future. We are rebuilding the bench, bringing in new leaders, etc, etc, etc.

So, two weeks ago, over on BlueSky, as I was going about my day, I posted something that I thought was pretty boring and very similar to what I’ve been saying for much of the last eight years.

Not gonna link to it because you don’t need encouragement to go down the rabbit hole.

I posted, then went back to my busy work day, not checking notifications for a while.

When I logged back on, there was an avalanche in my mentions. Hundreds of people were telling me in no uncertain terms they believed I was an absolute fucking idiot.

(As an aside: I’m not going to get into a long diatribe on why they’re wrong and I’m right — which, by the way, I am, because the Democratic Party is a membership-based institution, and so by definition, is driven by its members, so yes, if you want it to be different, you can literally change it from the inside. It’s not the only way, nor is it easy; changing the party requires hard work, organizing and, ahem, doing your politics, but it’s also not rocket science. See: The GOP over the last decade+.

I’m also not going to try to psychoanalyze why some people get mad when they are reminded they do, in fact, have agency in a situation, although I imagine it’s because if someone is told they have agency, then they have a responsibility to act — and failing to act is on them…

I will say, I did get a kick out of one of the replies in which someone told me how I’m obviously wrong and stupid because they went to the local Democratic party meeting, it was all senior citizens wanting to trade recipes, and they couldn’t get them to do anything meaningful. I dunno, dawg — seems like a skills issue if you couldn’t get enough of your friends to come with you consistently enough to out-organize some retirees!)

ANYWAY: After nearly a decade of this, I’m mostly pretty good at compartmentalizing the bullshit. This is not my first time at the dunking rodeo.

I’ve found that the best way to move forward is if I treat what people are saying about me on the internet as if it’s none of my business. Let them yell into the void. I muted the thread quickly and got back to my busy day.

Later that evening though, I was recounting this posting saga to my husband, and just as Chris describes in his writing, I got the urge to touch the bruise.

So after we put the kids to bed, I opened back up my phone and tapped through to see where the conversation had gone.

I read post after post about my own stupidity, my smug superiority, my clear blinders on why it’d be a total waste of time to try and fix a broken institution. I saw personal criticisms that went far beyond a critique of the party and went straight at me as an individual — calling me a rich out-of-touch white bitch, among other things.

I muted, blocked, and because of a cool BlueSky function, detached my own content from the dunks on me that had themselves gone viral.

I could feel my nerves frying, getting more tender and more furious as I scrolled.

After a half hour, I put my phone down, both too amped to get ready for bed and too exhausted to keep going.

“Why are you doing this?” my husband¹ asked me. “What do you get out of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I guess I just wanted to be mad.”

And isn’t that it, in a nutshell?

Maybe some or even many of the people dunking on me had good reasons for doing so. (I also often hate the Democratic Party for any number of reasons — that’s why I’m trying to fix it.)

But mostly I suspect they were looking for someone to be mad at — and when so much feels so bad, yelling at someone who will hear your screams can feel like catharsis.

And when I think about it that way, I don’t personalize it. Like Chris, the criticism from strangers often hits me viscerally, at least at first.

But when I woke up the next morning, anger dissolved and bruise quickly healed, I mostly just felt sad for the people doing the dunking. What a waste of their time to be mad at me when there is so much genuinely bad shit to be outraged about! How bleak must things be in their lives that my (honestly pretty boring) post was enough to get them into a tizzy!

I realize by writing about this I am opening myself back up to more disagreement or worse. Maybe this is my own fucked up way of chasing the negativity again.

But as we’re in a period of time where it feels like everyone is on the brink of a primal scream at any given point, I say all this to suggest that if you are the kind of person who like to dunk on strangers on the internet, or finds yourself getting into comment wars, or simply wants to do some yelling at someone, ask yourself:

Is this the actual person I’m mad at? Or are they simply the person most likely to hear me be mad?

May that answer lead you, hopefully, to putting your phone down.

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Book recs:

As stated above, Chris Hayes’ book is really good. Annoyingly I kept finding myself picking up my phone every few pages, basically proving his point.

I followed it up with Comedic Timing by Upasna Barath, a quick romance novella about Naina, a writer who moves to New York after a rough breakup with her longtime girlfriend, meets a handsome man, and questions her entire identity and goals. I was really excited about 831 Stories, the romance imprint that published this, but this is the third one of their I’ve read and while it’s good in its own right, the schtick of the books (quick novels with lots of deep talking between strangers) has worn a little thin for me.

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Other stuff:

• Lonely? Adopt surrogate grandparents. [Wired, which I just subscribed to and 10/10, recommend]
  

• A Financial Times columnist makes the case we’re in the “mask off era,” where people can be racist and offensive without consequence. I suspect that will not turn out to be the case, even if the consequences are not legal or financial but rather, people being sadder, lonelier, and pains in the ass to work for or with. [Financial Times]
  

• “No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post. In the right light, the social network for professionals is a lavish psychoanalytic corpus, bursting with naked ambition, inspiration, desperation, status-seeking, spiritual yearning, brownnosing, name-dropping, corporate shilling, and self-promotion. Novels have been written about less, but no one is on LinkedIn for the prose.” [Anna Weiner in the New Yorker, in a piece my upcoming book is in direct conversation with….]

1. A point of clarification, for the strangers: My husband has a name, and a whole identity outside of his relationship to me! But he works as a therapist, so I try to make it slightly harder for his patients to google him.